Jon Kern
Agile Evangelist

An original signatory to the Agile Manifesto, Jon Kern is passionate about helping clients succeed in delivering business value through software development efforts.  His varied career has spanned jet engine R&D through centrifuge-based flight simulators, to being an object-oriented evangelist during the ’90s.  He first published his lightweight iterative development methodology in Developers Guides for Lotus Notes 4.5 and 5.0.  He was motivated heavily by his friend Peter Coad’s mantra to deliver “frequent, tangible, working results.”  Mr. Kern put his techniques to work on DoD projects, and then at his own company (Lightship, Inc.).  In 1999, he joined Peter Coad for the start up of TogetherSoft, where he created the professional mentor group, and guided product development.  Mr. Kern was a co-author of Java Design, and worked with Peter Coad and Jeff De Luca to help shape the chapter on Feature-Driven Development (FDD) in Java Modeling in Color with UML.

After the sale of TogetherSoft to Borland in early 2003, Mr. Kern joined Compuware’s OptimalJ team and eventually became responsible for evangelizing agile methods and model-driven development.  Mr. Kern ’s “Straight-Talking” blog reached 34,000 hits in 2006, and his newsletter has 6400 subscribers.  After leaving Compuware in October, 2006, Mr. Kern began consulting.  He is working with his long-time friend at http://immuexa.com and his friends at ProcessExchange!

Jon Kern constantly seeks better ways for teams to accomplish their goals, from a technology perspective and from a process and methodology perspective.  You can find him blogging at http://technicaldebt.com/.